Thursday TV: Meloni Tackles Comedy as Jack

Thursday

Mar 27, 2014 at 11:27 AM

I've barely adjusted to The Goldbergs mining the 1980s for comic nostalgia seems not that long ago that Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's empty vault, and that's a subplot in an early April episode and now comes Fox's ...

TV Guide

I've barely adjusted to The Goldbergs mining the 1980s for comic nostalgia - seems not that long ago that Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's empty vault, and that's a subplot in an early April episode - and now comes Fox's Surviving Jack (Thursday, 9:30/8:30c), a coming-of-age family sitcom set in the not-so-distant past of the 1990s. (Can't wait for the arc about Y2K anxiety.)

The real draw of the show is not so much the gangly freshman Frankie (Connor Buckley), whose adolescent fixation on boobs could come from just about any era, but his father Jack, his gruff bully of a dad played by Christopher Meloni. His tough-guy persona, honed by years on SVU, is well suited for the role of a successful oncologist (cue awkward cancer jokes) and ex-military taskmaster forced to practice an aggressive form of tough love on his kids when his wife (the ever-welcome Rachael Harris) starts law school. Jack's "surrounded by idiots" misanthropy and drill-sergeant parenting threatens to wear thin, but Meloni sells it with an underlying intelligence and empathetic warmth. And if the period references (including an obsession with American Gladiators) often feel shoehorned in to remind us that this is someone's memoir - the someone being Justin Halpern, of $#*! My Dad Says infamy - the humiliations of high-school life are fairly timeless, if carrying with them a certain been-there, survived-that quality.

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